Erica Lennard produced her series Les Femmes, les Sœurs, between the United States and Europe when she was a young woman of 20. Coming from California she settled in Paris in 1973, she photographed her younger sister Elizabeth, her friends and the women she met and admired. These portraits of women are both an ode to the power and beauty of women and a quest for identity at an age when Erica Lennard was looking for new female models and beginning her photographic work. Living a life close to bohemian, surrounded by artists and writers, the settings she chooses are eminently beautiful and romantic: the archaeological site of Lindos in Greece, the Camargue in summer, an almost empty Haussmann apartment, the streets of Paris, and French gardens. She photographed women there not as objects of desire but as subjects of their own desires and thereby claimed freedom of life and thought at a time when the fight for women’s rights was intensifying in France. The photographer thus paints the portrait of a sorority that celebrates the plurality and richness of female existences. Erica Lennard writes in Les Femmes, Les Soeurs “I go with you and alone in the happy light of the hours accomplished; Without being like me, you are my reflection in these images. Elizabeth and I are sisters. We are all sisters. »
The prints presented in the Les Choses de la Vie exhibition are all from the period – in other words “vintage”, and made by hand by two artists who have a passionate attachment to the perfection of photographic prints.
Claude Batho & Erica Lennard, La Vie des Femmes
Opening Thursday, June 8, 2023 from 6 p.m.
Exhibition from June 8 to September 23, 2023
La Galerie Rouge
3 rue du Pont Louis-Philippe
75004 Paris
https://lagalerierouge.paris/
